Whistling past the graveyard…and wondering if the revolution will ever begin.

Big Bomba

Speaking of nuclear weapons, and how anachronistic they are, we have just passed the 50th anniversary of the most powerful nuke ever exploded: the Soviet Union’s 58-megaton, “Big Ivan,” hydrogen bomb. It was tested off Nova Zemlya on Oct. 30, 1961, and its force was equal to TEN times the power of all the bombs dropped during World War II, including the “Fat Man” and “Little Boy” nuclear bombs the US dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

That humanity, no matter what the circumstances or context, was toying with a bomb that powerful, says a lot about how we let history and politics get away from us.

Tim Zimmermann

I am a Washington-DC based writer, interested in politics, history and adventure. I am a Correspondent for Outside magazine, Associate Producer and Co-Writer of the documentary Blackfish, a former Senior Editor and Diplomatic Correspondent for US News & World Report, and author of The Race (Houghton Mifflin, 2002).